


Spring Symphony No. I & II

by paintbox (imstillprettyodd)



Category: Led Zeppelin
Genre: 1970s, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Hotels, Loss, Memories, Painting, Reunion Sex, acknowledging and knowing even after some years, anyways im obsessed with this idea, it bugs me and then there is seeing too
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-22
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:54:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27674314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imstillprettyodd/pseuds/paintbox
Summary: Monica and Jimmy meet again after the release of Presence. A reunion in two parts.
Relationships: Jimmy Page/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 8





	1. No. I

The kettle calls out and Monica twitches like a wet bird in the kitchenette. Something about what Peter said, her not belonging here, makes her cup the squat metal for heat, before remembering her body and filling the mugs. One for her and the other for Jimmy. The tea leaves and dried lavender petals, the ones she keeps in fabric pouches when traveling, color the water a dull brown. 

Monica carries them downstairs to the office, where the door’s closed and she’s forced to knock or call out. She uses her boot instead, kicking against the wood until the photographer opens up, staring at her, making space. Her hair's high off her neck after a home cut and two chopsticks; the exposure draws a shy, tight smile across her mouth as her eyes glean the room. The interviewer and photographer stand lopsided against the wall while Jimmy waits, holding the back of a chair. 

His look finds her, half-there and soft, and she returns it. The tea cups begin to tingle in her palms. 

The silence ruptures when the reporter offers his hand, "Well, thank you for talking with us. " It all moves on. She's by-passed in the doorway.

"My pleasure." Jimmy's polite smile follows them. He shuts the door with a hand and the air gusts out. Monica takes a deep, surprised breath and swallows. The space fills with him, smell — smoke and orchids — sight — flushed cheeks from the radiator, blown pupils. "You're here," he says.

She nods, holds out the mug and watches as he grips it, how he smiles again. But this time it's just for her. Fatigue stretches down into his cheeks where she leans in and kisses the soft skin there. Her heart flutters at his waiting and the arm that loops her and holds her close. 

"It's good to see you." 

"You too," she whispers. Five seconds, ten. She shuts her eyes just as Jimmy pulls away. He sits again with a leg held over the other and takes a testing sip of tea.

"House blend?" He asks. 

Monica takes the seat of the interviewer and folds over herself: elbows on knees. "House blend." She swallows spit and watches him over the rim of the mug. "I feel like you're supposed to ask me what I'm doing here."

His cheeks nearly rise. "What are you doing here?"

"I wanted to congratulate you again . . . and tell you how poignant I think this time is." Her eyes scan the threads of his dress pants. She remembers sewing clothes for her dolls as a girl, remembers them coming out floppy and lopsided. "Because you just made your album and I'm having my first gallery showing tomorrow." His legs shift in the still quiet. 

"You didn't tell me before."

"You had enough on your plate." And somehow, despite the look Jimmy gives her, a round examination of her face, it's enough. Another sip. "I was wondering if you wanted to come see it. Before anyone else."

"A private showing?"

Monica nods and bites down on her tongue to keep from smiling. Jimmy's smirk is light and true on his face. She wishes she had her camera, her charcoals.

He clears his throat and the sound of the mug on the coffee table leaves a dull percussion. “Will that photograph be there? The one with the kids?”

Monica nods and traces a whorl on the surface of the wood: round and round. A few weeks ago, he sent the record in the mail. All the way from England. Her name in his handwriting on the front and a note inside: _I almost wonder what you would've thought if you saw me working on it. You've always had that nervous habit._ And at the bottom, _I liked the photograph you sent. Would've used it if we hadn't picked the design already._

She wrote her letter the same day. _Thank you for it. I listened in the morning and again in the afternoon. It's overwhelming. How’d you get those layers in there? P.S. I'm glad you liked the photo._

Three of her neighbors’ children stood on the curb in black and white, fingers taking turns inside a red Kool-Aid mix pack. They were mid-feast, lips red with saliva and powder, open in laughs, and hands already stained and grabby.

Jimmy looks off, as if he sees the image on the far wall before he trails back to her. “Let me finish my tea. Then we’ll leave.”

She loiters in the office and thinks of herself crouched under the desk, leaning back on the sofa, sprawled and unordered in his chair. 

“It’s been awhile since you were here.” Jimmy catches on, following her look around the room. He licks his lips and stands. 

Monica makes a slight noise and fishes her keys from her coat. She knows the building well, wood baseboard and frosted doors; Jimmy and her get out before Peter’s able to reprimand. 

Monica lights his cigarette in the car and watches as his hand drifts out the window. Her tongue catches on small talk. There’s no need to ask how he’s been because she can see it in his face. He looks worn raw. 

“Want one?” He holds the Marlboro carton up. She made a New Years’ resolution to quit smoking, but broke it one morning in February. 

“Yeah.” She leans towards him and he places it between her lips. Her eyes swerve back to the street when the flame flares up orange and hot near her mouth. It reminds her of the winter she and Jimmy became chain smokers. The winter her aunt died. The winter Jimmy began to slowly turn into himself.

The gallery is naked and white in a city of old. Jimmy gets out and holds her door open into traffic. She laughs with nervous energy, but there are few cars on Thursday evening. A chill whips Jimmy’s hair into his face when they step on the sidewalk. He squints against it. Her hands fumble in her pockets. 

Monica unlocks the doors and lets him inside first. 

"The light's on the wall," she mumbles before taking her cigarette and smashing it under-heel. The walls turn eggshell, sparse, uninhabitable despite the shots of color from her paintings. Jimmy's already flocking toward the picture in the center: a de-personalized self-portrait, Monica had explained to her sponsor, an appetizer for the narcissist. A hand at the forefront, a hip. She'd stared for hours at Picasso's deconstruction of his mistresses and tried to find the woman. 

"It's you," Jimmy says. He traces the fractured edge of her painted self's shoulder in the air. 

Monica crosses her arms, crosses her legs. She has to piss from nerves. "I don't like this piece anymore." 

He turns to look at her. 

"It's not who I am . . . I need to use the restroom." She slips away to the office in the back of the gallery before Jimmy can say much else. She sighs in a way her body knows so well, chest rolling and lids heavy. The album’s just out and she’s made it all about her.

Washing her hands at the sink, she looks and surprises herself with her age. Her reflection shakes its head and she takes a deep breath, hands on the linoleum. She remembers being here before, traveling with girls that took names like Amethyst and Butterfly. She remembers she stole a bass player's money from his nightstand and split it among the girls for coke and notoriety.

She shakes her head one more time and leaves the bathroom. Jimmy's walking around, solitary observer. He studies the only photograph in her collection, the one she sent him, and reads the plaque beside it. A grimace crosses her face at the pieces he hasn't seen, at the ones that show a thin man in rushed ink. He’s stepping into a tub, he’s shaving in the mirror, he’s washing dishes at the kitchen sink. So obviously _him._ She shuns her look and watches as he takes a seat and contemplates her painting of a black cat. Smoothing out her skirt, Monica sits next to him. They look at the cat together. His hand sits between them on the bench, fingers stretched, veins apparent. 

It’s the pet they shared in Boleskine: Tibby. She ran away one day and never came back. Monica spent the night in the moors, sopping through in Jimmy’s wellies. He stayed on the porch, cat food in hand, flashlight swishing like a lighthouse signal across the yard. The next morning he caught the plane and Monica said she would look after the house until he came back to visit in between shows. She gave up the search after a week. Dulled in the gray light as the winter crawled into spring, Monica finished one sketch and called it “Cat.”

“I always wondered where Tibby ran off to,” Jimmy says. He’s cracking his knuckles. It sounds hard and angry when he does it. Monica used to copy him. 

“Me too. I’d like to imagine she got big and fat on another family’s food. Maybe someone that lived in the city.” She doesn’t say what she knows really happened. It feels good to lie. Today’s cold is like the cold from five years ago. Her gaze shoots up to look at him.

His eyes are cool-toned. When she paints them, she lightens cobalt green with white and gold. His mouth moves. “Monica?”

She tastes the memory of tears in her mouth. How silly she was . . . to cry like a teething baby with a toothache at the sight of him clean-shaven when he returned. 

Sitting beside, she wrings her hands and gives him a smile. “I’m just thinking.” 

“I know,” Jimmy says with a soft mouth. He navigates her. Before she can predict, he reaches across the gap and teases the twisting fabric of her skirt. "Show me the one you're most proud of." 

The excitement of being with him finally gets to her. Monica rises, smiling, and moves off into the other room as Jimmy follows. His footsteps are quiet across the concrete, she turns for a moment to make sure he’s still behind.

“ _Spring Symphony No. I_ ,” she tells him in front of a large beach landscape. The waves roll in as two tiny figures walk across the sand. A green tint hovers over it; Monica remembers a storm came later that day. “I was inspired by Whistler.” 

“ _The Shore, Pourville._ ” Under the bright lights, his hair shines with brown undertones. The violet silk scarf around his neck glistens. His face is clear, open. She can tell he is remembering too, that he feels the sand grainy between his fingers, that his skin of now still holds the taste of hers then.

“Yes,” she finally says. There is an absence. She can’t break through the space. 

But he unfolds his arms and his chest opens: a center she can press into, a center she knows. She moves in it and shuts her eyes at his warmth. He pulls a fatigue from her limbs. If he lets go, unwraps his arms, she’ll fall. 

Her breath wastes into the heavy fabric of his jacket, in, out, stringy with saliva as sobs wobble her lungs. It's a surprise to feel his hand on her hand, his soothing hum vibrating his body. It must not be a surprise for him; he told Monica before she carried loss in her arms like fruit.

In his cocoon, she shuts her eyes tight and sees orange slices, the red hill of a setting sun in the sky, menstrual blood clotted on her bedsheets. It would be an abstract piece in paint — the burnt sienna of moments gone.

When her tears stop, they rest against a pillar. “I’m sorry,” she tells Jimmy. Her skin is inflamed. 

“Don’t.” His eyelids drop low in a blink, rise again slowly. 

Monica pushes her thumb against the apple of his cheek to feel its softness. “You’re tired.”

He admits it with a nod, “This was a long winter,” and lets his hair fall as he lowers his head. The youth captures her. Ripe. She can see the pores of his skin, breathe the heat that comes from him. 

“I’m not staying very far away . . .” she begins. Jimmy’s already nodding. He grips her hand and brings it to his chest. Monica’s eyes wander near the entrance of the gallery when he warms her ice cold fingers between his palms. He brings her knuckles to his mouth as she falls back to staring at him and kisses the bones. 

“I’ll go with you,” he tells her. 


	2. No. II

Monica sits on the bed and watches the light shift and darken under the bathroom door. She listens for the faucet to shut off, for the quiet shush of body in water to take its place. Her nose scrunches with an emotion she can’t identify. When she wrings her hands, they feel empty and dry.

Coming back from the gallery, Jimmy had shrugged and said he wanted a bath. She drew him one and anchored around the bathroom until he came in, shucking his socks and smiling sideways.

In the bedroom, she takes off her own socks and boots and pulls a purple slip over her head. She takes down her hair and shifts and imagines that if Jimmy were beside her, he would take her hand, soothe her with a look. As he’d done the years before. As she did with him. 

Her eyes focus on a spot on the floor where the carpet pattern circles like a whirlpool of fabric. She watches it drain down. 

The clock ticks; ten minutes have gone by. The bathwater drips and drags with the rise of Jimmy’s body. Monica straightens and climbs in bed to turn on her side. She brought a blanket from home; she pulls it over herself. 

The door opens and closes. Jimmy pads across the floor until his footsteps stop at her side and his hand, brief, brushes her hip and makes her skin heat. She lets her eyes open and finds him above her, toweled, soft and dewy. She’s seen him like this, imagined him, drew him. Her mind moves: a wild thing. 

“I thought you were sleeping,” he says. Water droplets shine on his collarbones. His hands hang at his sides. 

“No, just resting,” she tells him.

He turns to walk around the bed. The mattress dips and his weight nears her. Her teeth catch her lip. The walls in the hotel room are a light grey, a color that fades when she unfocuses her vision and lets herself drift. 

“Your opening day is tomorrow?” Jimmy’s voice is mild, cool, and sober. 

“I’m nervous.” 

His hand is warm from the bath, fingers calloused and close when he pulls her hair back from her cheek. Beneath the blanket, goosebumps flare up her arms. 

“About what?”

“The people,” she laughs breathy. A sound brushes at the back of her throat: an unfinished sentence. 

Jimmy waits. His palm rests against her neck, above her pulse. And when the silence gets too much for her, she fills it with voice, gives the spotlight back to him. 

"Last time we talked, you said you were going to focus on the film again." 

"Mmm, it's still a project we all want to see finished. I'm hoping we can release it toward the end of this year. The people, you were saying.”

Her tongue traces her teeth. She’s too tired, too tender, to bring up his change in attitude. “I have to introduce my show to everyone. Walk around the room and greet people. Answer questions. What if no one likes my art?” 

The clock makes itself known again and she’s suddenly aware that he’s spending the night with her, that she has him next to her and his voice is soothing in her ear:

“I missed you, Monica.”

Her face crumples. She hides it in the pillows. 

“Don’t go yet,” he says. "I've just seen you." But he doesn't touch her to force her over.

The pillow holds the scent of her shampoo and the hotel's laundry detergent — a rough clean, half-familiar like an old memory. She listens to a car honk outside. 

Finally, Monica swallows and opens her mouth just enough. "I know."

He caresses her again and the contact feels like it spreads across her entirety. "You haven't let me see you in a while."

_Neither have you_ , but those words won't come. She folds them and tucks them away and replaces them. “I missed you too.” A voice muffled and hands curled by her head.

Jimmy traces her body with a touch, down to her waist and back up to her shoulder. She shivers and breathes. 

"Tell me about your speech."

"It's just a description. Why I put all of the pieces together, my inspiration, things like that. My sponsor said I should do it."

"Do you like your sponsor?" He moves down, over the swell of her hip and settles his hand on the soft tissue of her backside.

"I have to. It's her money. She has all these dinners and galas arranged if things go well." She pauses and settles, focusing on the warmth he brings her. His fingers linger at the soft flesh beneath her ass and the space between her thighs. He hums.

“There," a soothing word. "You’re warm here." It makes her angle her hips sideways and his hand follows, pressing to the wetness on her panties. “And here, inside, you’re searing hot.”

A breath escapes. “You told me that a long time ago.”

“The first time?” Jimmy asks. His hand moves, slow, back and forth. 

Monica’s shoulders roll. She shuts her eyes and reaches back for him. She catches his shoulder. “No, when we were at Bron-yr-aur.”

“When it was wet and green outside. . . we slept naked always.”

She hums, the thought spreads her smile: the pink sheen of his skin after they made love and his hair soft and fragrant. 

He pushes her underwear aside and their gasps come equally when he slips in a finger. 

"Thinking of that first time makes me hard."

Heat in her stomach. "Shh. Jimmy, please. I can't relax."

He adds a second finger and she clenches her teeth. A soft noise escapes her.

"You don't want to remember?" Light, slow, stretching, teasing. He mouths the space beneath her ear. 

"I do. But I thought you didn't." 

"I do. I always did." 

Her eyebrows furrow painfully. That same feeling from earlier returns and sits, hot as a coal, in her chest. 

"I thought you were tired," she mumbles. 

"I am. I'm very tired."

"But this is a reprieve, for now."

"For now. We'll tour soon, again. Do you want me there tomorrow?" Jimmy kisses the back of her neck.

"Let's not talk about me. Talk about you, instead."

His thumb draws circles around her bud. "Shh," he whispers, enough to make her grow soft. "Now, the first time." His hips ache and press against hers. His other hand loops under the pillow to grab her own. "You were all nerve."

She laughs out loud, soothed and gooey. His fingers work inside. She tugs him closer and feels his erection.

"Sucking me off in your bikini with your hair in plaits. Very prideful."

Arousal blooms in her abdomen from the image. She tightens her hold on Jimmy's hand. "What do you mean?"

"Pride: the look in your eyes."

"I don't remember being like that." Her last word catches with a moan: the beginnings of a slow-spurred orgasm.

"You were," he says, and before she can expect it, retrieves his fingers. 

She gasps again and says his name. And, again, he kisses a smile into her neck.

Gentle, steady, Jimmy lifts her leg over his own, trapping her thigh there. A shallow breath enters and leaves her body. She reaches back at the same time as he reaches forward to guide himself within her. Her fingers brush wrist, escape and wind around his forearm when he stretches her. 

His is a body well known, a body held and savored. She allows herself to relax when he settles his rhythm, the same as before. His mouth wets her shoulder and neck, sucking a spot purple where the two join. He follows the path up, readjusting, slipping closer to her to kiss her lips and rest his cheek against hers. Soft curls press to her face. With her eyes shut, she can imagine that things are well and she is happy and every night ends the same like this.

Underneath it all is the tightening in her stomach, nearly breaking. 

"You're almost there," Jimmy says with a voice uneven.

Blurry, caught, she nods. 

"What do you need?" But already he has his fingers on her lips, pushing between and past. No need to answer when she tastes and sighs.

No need to answer when she comes around him, flowing, bright. With the shudder and her name hot on the air, he follows after. 

They stay wrapped, with dewy skin and breaths, until he unravels from her and turns on his back with a sigh. The sudden loss of heat surprises. Monica opens her eyes to the gray room and searches for color. Her body throbs with fuchsia.

"Are you hungry?" Jimmy asks. 

She rolls over to face him, finds him humid and reclined. His towel lies bunched beneath him. His hair is frizzy and still damp. 

"Yes." She watches him lean away, the gentle length of his back, the canvas-stretch of skin across his ribs. She shuts her mouth and lets him order a strawberry cheesecake for her. When he hangs up on the line, she touches his chest. 

He regards her with the look from the office, as if he's gone back to keeping something interior. She lets him have it as she gets up and steps out of her underwear. In the bathroom, she sets them in the sink and uses the toilet. There's water on the floor from Jimmy's bath; Monica towels it up with her feet. 

"Will you get the door when they knock?" Jimmy says when she returns to the bedroom. 

She nods and sits on the bed. "Like in Japan when you were naked and criminal." 

His eyes crease. "Like in Japan." His look drifts, then returns. "They'll see you."

"Who? The room service?"

He shakes his head and lingers his palm over hers. "Your audience for tomorrow."

"Like when you see me?" Her face aches. 

"Yes. Like now."

Monica is afraid of what he might say next, but he only brushes her cheek with his thumb. At the door, room service knocks and she answers with a smile. There's a bottle of wine in ice and the cheesecake in its cloister.

They sit in bed and eat and drink. It's comfortable. The clock counts the minutes and when Monica finally turns off the lights, she drags herself into Jimmy, where there is comfort and rest. 


End file.
